Maybe it’s because it was Halloween, but there’s something spooky about our return to League One. One of the reliefs of relegation was the return to familiarity; when we were promoted in 2024 we were the longest serving League One club in the division behind Shrewsbury.

Like your favourite Doctor Who being the first one you remember, I imagine that the ‘natural level’ for a football club is determined by where you first encountered them. Manchester City fans are going through an identity crisis right now; for some the prospect of relegation for financial irregularities is part of the undulating life of a City fan. For more recent fans it’s unfathomable that they won’t have Champions League football, let alone Premier League football.

For me, the third tier is our natural level, where I should feel entirely at home. Over the years it’s changed. In the eighties and nineties, it was a tour of the nation’s charming backwaters with crumbling stadiums and local idiosyncrasies, an perpetual quirk of Britishness.

When we scrapped our way back in 2016, after our dalliance with the Conference, it had become polarised. At the top were refugees of Premier League ambition, huge clubs with big followings and big reputations that were offset by mismanagement. At the bottom were the teams who were better run, but suffered the historic inertia; their size ultimately limiting their success.

Our return this season feels different again; when we left, Barnsley and Wigan were both big clubs who were looking up towards the Championship and above, Stockport didn’t even exist conceptually as a League One side. Sheffield Wednesday and Leicester City, two sides who should be sitting at the top of the table (or not at this level) are mid-table. Something stirred the pot and the whole thing has become mixed up.

And then, there’s our role in the division. On one hand, despite two years in the Championship, we’re a League One stalwart. We won some, we lost some, in 2024 we won enough to be promoted, but most of the time we came up a bit short. As an existence, it was fine.

On the other hand, we’re returning from the Championship, wounded but reshaped. A bigger club with better players in a smaller division. Our experiences have put distance between us and Stevenage and Burton, teams we’d once considered to be peers.

On the third hand, in the current circumstances it’s appropriate to have three hands, we have our own crises to deal with; a silent ownership, stadium delays, a transfer embargo. Aaron Ramsey may be the perfect manager for our time; on one hand he’s a big name with a big reputation from his playing days, on the other a novice and a complete managerial unknown. Nobody truly knows which direction he’s heading, which is also true about us.

As a result, I’m still not sure if we’re on a promotion charge or whether our points to date are just a welcome insulation from an inevitable slump later in the year. Some people were predicting relegation for us, admittedly with only half the information about what the transfer embargo actually meant. That, at least, seems highly unlikely now, but to admit we’re in a promotion push feels too ambitious, too arrogant.

So, the trip to Barnsley was taken in a ball of confusion. When we left League One in 2024, they were the best footballing side in the division, part of a cohort of teams who’d expect to make the play-offs as a minimum. Somehow in two years, they’ve found themselves deep in a relegation fight, surrounded by other classic play-off aspirants like Peterborough, Wigan and Blackpool.

After the win over Stockport, we should have gone into the game with high hopes but I couldn’t quite bring myself to be confident about it. It wasn’t the natural order of things, Barnsley should be a hard place to go.

It was made harder by the absence of Ciaron Brown and Cameron Brannagan. Brannagan was always likely to stay at Oxford after relegation as he’s settled and comfortable. Brown may be similar. None-the-less, by rights, players of that quality and experience should probably have left over the summer, were it not for the embargo.

Without them, the starting eleven looked a bit more like a League One side of yore. It made going to Barnsley a hard place to go. Then after nine minutes Jack Shepherd ploughed into Louis Sibley. Shepherd’s only defence was incompetence and perhaps the hope the referee wouldn’t brandish a red card so early in the game. His incompetence remained but the referee didn’t feel bashful and sent him for an early shower.

The platform tilted again, right up until Reyes Cleary ran through our midfield and defence to release Jubril Okedina, who was only on the pitch because of the sending off. Okedina centred to Yoganathan to side foot in. It looked like the kind of goal we’ve been scoring.

Obviously when you have a man advantage after 10 minutes against a relegation threatened side who have taken one point in their last seven, the first thing you contrive to do is concede a goal.

Was that it? The bubble bursting? The reality of our situation revealing itself. Was the first part of the season a fantasy? An algorithmic hallucination about Aaron Ramsey’s remarkable coaching talents for the nation’s vloggers to latch onto?

Losing at Barnsley wasn’t disappointing, it felt normal. Aside from Tyler Goodrham’s twenty five yard pile driver that cannoned off the bar, it looked like Ramsey’s alchemy, for once, wasn’t going to work.

But his witching hour is on the hour; that’s when he makes his move and we press home our advantage. Like clockwork, on 60 minutes, Sam Long pulled out a raking 35 yard Brannagan-esque pass to Aidomo Emakhu. Emakhu advanced, his shot squirmed kindly off Ziyad Larkeche and Mark Harris finished with un-Harris like aplomb.

The axis tilted again, but not back to a familiar angle, just to another befuddling position. What it meant, nobody knew. As if to illustrate the confusion, Jamie Cumming pulled off a points winning save at his near post then followed up with a mad dash from his box to stop Rylan Brownlie who’d broken down the left.

Cumming got the ball, but catapulted Brownlie into the air. There were at least two players covering, but the referee sent him off, as much for reckless decision making as reckless tackling. Cumming’s schizophrenic season is our conundrum wrapped up into one.

The result is a point on the road, which is broadly fine in the context, even if it still doesn’t answer any questions about the season we’re having. Naturally, because this is a completely normal year, our next five games are all at home, and obviously only two of them are league games, and obviously that’s part of a sequence of ten home games in twelve, and obviously that sequence could be eleven in thirteen if we progress in the FA Cup. It’s all very normal and nothing to worry about. If AI doesn’t kill us all, being driven mad by this season might.

There’s little doubt that Aaron Ramsey has created a fun team to watch and third place with games in hand is more than most people thought was possible, but we still seem a long way from knowing what the new normal is supposed to look like.

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